Educational blog articles around inbound marketing.

6 SEO Tools To Track Local Google Rankings

Defining Terms

If you’renot sure whether to use SEO, Facebook advertising, or PPC, you’re not alone; It’s a question small businesses wrestle with and a frequent topic during meetings with prospective clients. To further complicate the discussion, paid advertising on Facebook has entered the debate…. I would tell you to do all three.

Certainly this is something easier said than done, but if you’re diligent about collecting data pertaining to these advertising solutions, you’ll be able to see which outreach innovation is most effective to your business, and concentrate on that. Accordingly, the following are six tools you can use to help you garner actionable SEO data.

Two: DYNO Mapper

This is a visual sitemap generator that doubles as a keyword tracking tool. Tools like DYNO Mapper allow you to see which particular words are the most effective, and to properly saturate them throughout your content. Additionally, with this tool you gain the ability to monitor competitors in order to reap insight.

Three: Moz Pro

If you’re unfamiliar with Moz, it’s a Seattle-based company that has quickly grown to dominate the entire web in terms of ranking, site authority, and more. DA, or Domain Authority, is a score given from an aggregate of factors, not least of which being market trends. Moz has many keyword tracking tools and can help you design effective content.

Four: Google Webmaster Tools

This is a resource designed for the individual in marketing who doesn’t really understand, but is looking to advance this lack of understanding. It’s a tool that allows you to take data “straight from the horse’s mouth”, as the saying goes. You can understand how Google ranks varying content in the company’s own words. This is also a free tool.

Five: SEMRush

SEMRush can help you audit your SEO practices. Additionally you are able to access a number of features like position tracking and competitive intelligence. This tool also gives users ideas to help organically generate traffic. Additionally you can audit backlinks and see analytics pertaining to them. These things are just the tip of SEMRush’s iceberg when it comes to SEO tools.

Six: KeywordTool.io

This tool provides users with over 700 ideas for keywords when a single word is entered into the program’s text box. Basically, you just type in the word you’re looking to optimize content around, and the generator will give you a bunch of keywords of the long-tail variety. These are organized alphabetically for ease in navigation.

Really, this is one of the most important tools summarized in this writing, as keywords are core to SEO. You want to be able to generate them as necessary and in a unique way.

Finding Your Best Solution

There are a lot of different ways you can go about optimizing your online SEO presence, but your best bet is often going to be using established tools put into place by those who’ve gone before you. There’s no use reinventing the wheel when there’s a perfectly good tire store across the street.

With the proper SEO tools, you can cost-effectively increase competitive advantage in a way which pays for the tools themselves. Though, since most of them are free to begin with, you’re likely to find they start “pulling their own weight”, as it were, right off the bat.